"The pain of defeat is sometimes too much," head coach Lisa Alexander said. "It took a long time to get over that."

So as the 2014 games approached, Alexander and her team searched for inspiration — for anything that could give them an edge. As part of the rebuilding process, they welcomed a new performance analyst to the coaching staff: Dr Mooney.

As an Aussie Rules guy who did his doctorate with the University of Ballarat and Essendon Football Club, Dr Mooney landed in the Diamonds camp like a fish out of water.

"He didn't know netball," Alexander explained. "So he had to fight through a little bit of ego from some of our coaches."

What's more, Dr Mooney wasn't prepared to be just another performance analyst, shooting video and collecting data. He wanted to find a different way to think — and was looking for inspiration from outside sports science.

Professor Ackoff explained the idea using the metaphor of a car: "The essential property of an automobile is that it can carry you from one place to another. No part of an automobile can do that. The wheel can't, the axle can't, the seat can't, the motor can't — the motor can't even carry itself from one place to another. But the automobile can."

If this holds true for a car, thought Dr Mooney, then could it work for a netball team?

Enter the fish tank

The idea that set Dr Mooney's imagination alight is, in fact, the cornerstone of a relatively new scientific discipline.

The same idea excites Ash Ward, head of the University of Sydney's Animal Behaviour Lab, who works in a humming, humid room lined with tanks full of exotic fish.

"Although we're studying fish, what we're hoping to do is find out more about the collective behaviour of other animals," he said.

"It often comes as a really big surprise to people that the collective behaviour of fish is very similar to the behaviour of humans."

This science is driven by the same principle as Professor Ackoff's automobile: the whole — the flock, or the swarm, or the shoal — is greater than the sum of its parts.

"These animals look as though they're all of one mind," Professor Ward said. "They look as though they're all connected by some kind of collective consciousness."

For a long time, that was scientists' best guess at what was going on: shoaling or flocking animals were, at some level, sharing a brain.

But with the rise of computing power, scientists started to model and simulate the behaviour of large groups — with astonishing results.

Given a simple set of rules — don't move too close or too far from your neighbours, and when you're at the right distance, copy what they're doing — dots on a screen can produce bafflingly complex group behaviours.

Of course, dots in a computer simulation are a long way from living, breathing animals. Were these simple rules also what fish and birds use in their flocks and shoals?

"That's where we came in," Professor Ward said. "We started to physically test these ideas. What we found was that actually the computer guys have done an extremely good job."

Professor Ward and his team found that in a school of fish all the individual animals are just minding their personal space, watching a few nearby fish to make sure they don't get too close or too far away from each other.

Both Dr Mooney and Professor Ward use software to search footage for reliable cues that indicate a pattern is emerging. While Professor Ward looked for cues in the behaviour of individual fish which might predict a pattern at the shoal level, Dr Mooney looked for things individual players do that might predict a pattern of play at the team level.

"You can't independently evaluate a player without understanding what that player's role is in the team," he said.

For Dr Mooney, the holy grail of performance analysis was understanding what your opposition intend to do before they do it. And if you can identify what a team is about to do, you can intervene.

Knowing the next move they don't know they'll make

Dr Mooney won't go into the specifics of what he uncovered.

"Then we'd be giving away our competitive advantage, wouldn't we?"

But loosely speaking, he found three specific on-court scenarios that the Australian team could use to predict what the New Zealanders were going to do next.

Dr Mooney was surprised and delighted. And he discovered it wasn't just New Zealand that displayed these team-level, instinctive behaviours. Every nation he analysed — New Zealand, England, Jamaica and, yes, Australia — had its own quantifiable patterns.

"All four countries have their own culturally significant way of playing. It's almost like a different species," he said.

When Dr Mooney dug even deeper into his trove of footage, he found these nation-specific instincts weren't unique to the national, elite teams; the patterns were apparent all the way down to the junior level.

"It's the way New Zealand thinks that netball ought to be played," he said.

"The same goes with Australia. Australia believes that netball ought to be played in a certain way, so does England, so does Jamaica, so does every other country. And they play it accordingly.

"What we're trying to do is uncover the rules associated with those ways of playing."

Not your average team briefing

Dr Mooney's next challenge was presenting his findings to the Diamonds.

It wasn't a typical performance analysis session. Instead of starting with stats or player-on-player analyses, Dr Mooney dimmed the lights and pressed play.